1. Technical Field
The present application relates generally to an improved data processing system and method. More specifically, the present application is directed to a system and mechanism for integrated guidance and validation zoning of devices, such as serial attached SCSI (SAS) devices, for example, in a storage area network (SAN).
2. Description of Related Art
Storage area networks, or SANs, consist of multiple storage devices connected by one or more fabrics. Storage devices can be of two types: host systems that access data, and storage subsystems that are providers of data. Zoning is a network-layer access control mechanism that dictates which storage subsystems are visible to which host systems. This access control mechanism is useful in scenarios where the storage area network is shared across multiple administrative or functional domains. Such scenarios are common in large installations of storage area networks, such as those found in storage service providers.
The current approach to zoning storage area networks is manual and involves correlating information from multiple sources to achieve the desired results. For example, if a system administrator wants to put multiple storage devices in one zone, the system administrator has to identify all the ports belonging to the storage devices, verify the fabric connectivity of these storage devices to determine the intermediate switch ports and input all this assembled information into the zone configuration utility provided by the fabric manufacturer. This manual process is very error-prone because storage devices or switch ports are identified by a 16-byte hexadecimal notation that is not easy to remember or manipulate. Furthermore, the system administrator has to also do a manual translation of any zoning policy to determine the number of zones as well as the assignment of storage devices to zones.
One technology that is being used more prevalently with storage area networks is Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) communication protocol technology. SAS is a computer bus technology primarily designed for transfer of data to and from devices such as hard drives, CD-ROM drives, tape storage devices, and the like. SAS is a serial communication protocol for direct attached storage (DAS) devices. It is designed for the corporate and enterprise market as a replacement for parallel SCSI, allowing for much higher speed data transfers than previously available, and is backwards-compatible with serial advanced technology attachment (SATA) drives. Though SAS uses serial communication instead of the parallel method found in traditional SCSI devices, it still uses SCSI commands for interacting with SAS end devices.
Fibre Channel is a high-speed transport technology used to build storage area networks. Although Fibre Channel can be used as a general-purpose network carrying asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), Internet Protocol (IP) and other protocols, it is primarily used for transporting SCSI traffic from servers to disk arrays. The Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP) serializes SCSI commands into Fibre Channel frames. IP, however, may be used for in-band simple network management protocol (SNMP) network management. Fibre Channel can be configured point-to-point, via a switched topology or in an arbitrated loop (FC-AL) with or without a hub.
In the Fibre Channel domain, one typically uses port unique identifiers, referred to as world wide names (WWNs), to create a zone. WWNs are 16 byte identifiers, and, therefore, users make many transcribing related mistakes when creating a zone. Users may inadvertently allow a wrong host to see the wrong storage, or they may accidentally omit a host from seeing the required storage. Users may miss out on best practices, which ensure that the devices in the zone are operating correctly. Some example zoning related policies may dictate that host bus adapters (HBAs) from different venders should not to be used in the same zone because they can cause incorrect operation for the devices in the zone, that there should not be more than a predetermined number of zones in a fabric, that there should not be more than a predetermined number of zone members in a zone, or that hosts having different operating systems should not be in the same zone.
Zoning in a storage area network is particularly difficult. Typically, the zoning is a two step mapping where each individual port, or “PHY,” is assigned to a zone and then, as a subsequent step, each zone is added to a zone group. Storage area networks fabrics only allow one zone group to be active, so all the required zones must be part of the active or loaded zone group. A complex storage area network may have several fabrics with several zones, each of which can be part of one or more zone groups. Zoning is increasingly being targeted at users or customers who do not necessarily have storage area network knowledge or skills and, thus, do not have the necessary background to perform the manual zoning of storage area networks. Thus, these users or customers required aids to help make the zoning of the storage area network easier.